DEATH PENALTY FOR VIOLATION OF SUNDAY LAWS.
NATIONAL REFORMERS, as our readers know, are an organized body who have for more than thirty years been zealously working to unite church and state in this country, or to secure a religious amendment to the Constitution and more uniform and drastic Sunday laws. While the National Reform Association has not grown greatly, its educational work has been great, and its principles of religion by law have taken deep root in various religious organizations and educational institutions. The Rev. J. M. Foster is one of the leading advocates and exponents of the association. He is qualified to set forth its aims, having been for years one of its approved field lecturers. At a National Reform convention held in New York City, Mr. Foster said:— We sometimes think the Pilgrim Fathers were too severe in their legislation against immorality. There was a law in the colonial statutes of New England that, for a flagrant violation of the Sabbath, the offender should be hung. We may say this was wrong; but let me ask, Were they nearer or further from the moral law as interpreted by the Mosaic legislation than we are? Under the Mosaic law a man guilty of idolatry and Sabbath-breaking was to be executed; and I apprehend that we ought to return to that order of things to-day, and execute the penalty for the violation of moral law. A man who openly and violently blasphemes the name of God has forfeited his right to live under the God whose law he has broken. Others may not be as free so to express the ultimate conclusions of the church and state propaganda; but Mr. Foster’s utterance embodies the inevitable logic of the National Reform idea. That is in it, and it has been permitted to work out in past generations. The Dark Ages were dark for the people of God because this very National Reform dogma was carried to its ultimate. The Dark Ages were red with the spilled blood of Christ’s faithful ones because men had power to enforce that tenet of a distorted faith. The true Christian will leave with God the punishment for sin, nor seek to inbrue his hands in the9blood of his fellow-men who may differ from him in matters of faith. Christ came to give life, not to take it. His followers have no warrant for executing upon any the penalty of death.